Headlines - Tuesday September 20

Violent crime in the United States continues to drop significantly despite the difficult economic environment, according to new statistics released Friday by the Justice Department.

According to the Crime Victimization Survey released annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2010 violent crimes dropped about 13% among U.S. residents ages 12 or older.

Meanwhile, according to Gallup, 66 percent of Americans believe crime is worse now than it was a year ago. The graph turns on a dime in late 2001 and, since then, Americans increasingly believe crime is getting worse. Hmm. What changed in late 2001? Oh yeah. Republicans amped up their fear-mongering and insisted that scary toe-monsters were lurking under our beds and could kill us down dead at any moment.

4,474 soldiers killed in Iraq; 1,775 in Afghanistan - and hundreds of thousands of dark skinned adults and children.

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Right Wing Watch reports that the supposed Tea Party challenger to Rep. John Boehner is actually a plant from Operation Rescue's Randall Terry, who has previously succeeded in forcing TV stations to accept gruesome anti-abortion commercials under the equal access election laws.

Teabagger Representative John Fleming (R-LA) appeared on MSNBC today to protest President Obama's "Buffet Tax" and while doing so he inadvertently provided us with a shinning example of the economic disconnect between most members of congress and average Americans.

"In my own case, I own LLCs," Fleming told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "The income flows to my personal tax return and whatever is left over after taxes are paid, I feed my family on the one hand and on the other hand, I reinvest in my business."

"With all due respect, The Wall Street Journal estimated that your businesses, which I believe are Subway sandwich shops and UPS stores — very successful — brought you last year, over $6 million," Jansing noted.

"Yeah, that's before you pay 500 employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment and food," Fleming agreed. "Since my net income — and again, that's the individual rate that I told you about — the amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million. And so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment."

After taking home $600,000 dollars, he is left with only $400,000 after feeding his family? Woe is me!

Does he spend $200,000 per year on food? Even if you included the cost of education, transportation, and clothing in your "feed the family" figure, that's four times the national average salary in America, and he still has $400,000 leftover not including his congressional salary of $174,000.

By the way, John Fleming does not employ 500 people, unless he's only paying them about $11,000 per year each.

If we ensure John Fleming pays as high of a percentage rate in taxes as his paid-in-peanuts employees, the terrorists socialists win.

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What better way to entice new customers to your business than to hand out assault rifles at the door like some kind of party-favor?

One Florida company has found a novel way of enticing new customers to open accounts that takes advantage of America's lax gun laws: offering people free AK-47 assault rifles! The Broward Palm Beach New Times reports that MerchantService.com, a Sarasota-based company that provides the equipment and processing for businesses' credit card transactions, announced its "Free AK-47 Giveaway" last Thursday. Based on the size of their order, customers can redeem a voucher for an AK-47 worth up to $750. Their website features a "God, Guns & Guts" banner as part of its "No Victims" campaign that promotes carrying assault rifles to protect against robberies and other crimes. "

While it's true that Texas is responsible for 40% of the jobs added in the U.S. over the past two years, its poverty rate also grew faster than the national average in 2010.

Texas ranks 6th in terms of people living in poverty. Some 18.4% of Texans were impoverished in 2010, up from 17.3% a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data released this week. The national average is 15.1%.

And being poor in Texas isn't easy. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita and the highest share of those lacking health insurance. It doesn't provide a lot of support services to those in need: Relatively few collect food stamps and qualifying for cash assistance is particularly tough.

The Houston Chronicle says that in spite of all the problems there, Texans have paid $294K for Perry security during his travels.

"I was in Kenya about a year and a half ago and everybody said, "you know he was born here…Why else would he be hiding all his records? He is spending millions of dollars so we do not have his records..And experts have already looked at and been able to verify that this long form document is a fraud. But the media ignores it….a total fraud. A photo-shopped fraud… Growing up in Indonesia, he used to read the Koran in Arabic..so that was instilled in him as a young boy…he hasn't celebrated any Christian holidays in the White House, but he does Ramadan."

We're guessing ol' Pat's invite to Christmas was *cough* lost in the mail? Yes.

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Even though seven of the nine people who testified against him have recanted or changed their testimonies, no murder weapon was ever found, no DNA evidence or fingerprints tie Davis to the crime, and other witnesses have since said the murder was committed by another man -- a witness who testified against Davis, Death-row inmate Troy Davis loses clemency appeal and will be put to death on Wednesday.

Sadly, this was entirely predictable. "As the U.S. economy began to tank, the number of abused kids landing in the hospital with severe brain injuries spiked, a new study shows. ... Anecdotes linking child abuse to the recession have surfaced before, but there had been no hard data to back the connection until now. ... "It's definitely disturbing," said Elizabeth Gershoff, a psychologist who studies parenting, but was not involved in the study. ... Although there is no proof that financial hardship itself is causing the uptick in abuse, earlier research has tied parental stress to child maltreatment. ... "Living in poverty for parents can be very stressful," Gershoff, of the University of Texas at Austin, told Reuters Health. "And that in turn leads to harsher parenting." ... The new findings, released on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, are based on hospital data on kids under five from Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington."

Responding to an ad produced by the group Patriot Millionaires calling for raising taxes on the wealthy, Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) — who was worth up to $37 million in 2009, the most recent year available — said he doesn't want to pay anymore in taxes. "I don't want to raise my taxes," Campbell said, "I don't want to raise anybody's taxes." Campbell added that billionaire Warren Buffet, who has called for raising taxes, can pay more to government if he wants to, "but don't ask me and a whole lot of other Americans" to pay too. Watch it.

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Republicans in the news

Rhode Island GOP lawmaker turns out to be wanted fugitive

Massachusetts has discovered a new place to try to hunt down its wanted criminals: the Rhode Island state legislature! It seems kind of obvious in retrospect, only because the Ocean State is kind of a sad, drug-addled dump from what we hear. Rep. Daniel Gordon Jr. was arrested in Rhode Island for failing to appear in Massachusetts court on charges of evading a police officer, although technically the fun part of this story is that the Rhode Island State Police also discovered in the process that the freshman Republican lawmaker has been in jail on and off in Massachusetts for the last two decades on a dizzying array of assault, attempted murder and drug charges. Normally for a politician being a violent asshole is a kind of fast-track qualification for guaranteed success, but as it turns out, everybody already sort of hated Gordon. READ MORE »